Stanford Quiz Bowl is pleased to announce that Cardinal Classic XVII: The Stanford Quizzin' Experiment will take place on Saturday, February 2, 2008. Note that unlike some of the most recent Cardinal Classics, this tournament will actually take place at Stanford. The team meeting will be at 10 am in room 200 of the Old Union.

This is an academic, packet submission tournament, open to all players, regardless of academic affiliation. The target difficulty is slightly easier than ACF Regionals 2007 was. I (Brian Lindquist) will be the head editor, with the assistance of Kevin Koai, Arnav Moudgil, and Kristiaan De Greve.

If any schools are interested in mirroring Cardinal Classic, they should contact me at blindqui at stanford dot edu. MIT has already expressed interest in hosting a mirror; I assume they will post an announcement soon.

FEE STRUCTURE
Base fee for 1st team from school: $100
Base fee for 2nd and subsequent teams from school: $90
Buzzer Discount: -$10 per fully-functional system (max 2 per team)

PACKET DEADLINES/DISCOUNTS
Packet by December 21: -$40
Packet by December 28: -$20
Packet by January 4: +$0
Packet by January 11: +$20
Packet by January 18: +$40

Teams that wish to play, but do not want to submit a packet, must request a dispensation by January 4, in which case they might be allowed to play for a penalty of +$50. Teams that do not submit a packet will not be allowed to play, unless they have been granted a dispensation by January 4.

If your school is sending multiple teams, make sure that each team keeps its packet completely blind to the other teams prior to the tournament.

PACKET DISTRIBUTION
Each team should write a 24/24 packet, with the following distribution:
Literature [5/5] (3/3 American/British, 2/2 world)
History [5/5] (2/2 American, 2/2 European, 1/1 world)
Science [5/5] (1/1 each of bio, chem, physics. Remaining 2/2 your choice, but no more than 2/2 of any single "big three", and no more than 1/1 of any minor category)
Religion, Myth, Philosophy [3/3] (1/1 each)
Fine Arts [3/3] (Including at least 1/1 each of painting, music. Remaining 1/1 your choice.)
Social Science [1/1]
Geography [1/1]
Your Choice [1/1] (Could be any of the above categories, but could also be trash, current events, other)

FORMATTING:
Packets should be submitted in a format readable by Microsoft Word, preferably either .doc or .rtf. A plain text attachment, although not preferred, is also acceptable.

At the top of your packet, include the team name and the team members or people who contributed to the packet. Questions should be sorted by category: put all history tossups and bonuses under a heading "History", followed by a section labeled "Science", etc. Please do not number your questions.

Questions should be written in 10-point, Times New Roman font, with 1 inch margins. Tossups should be no more than 7 lines long.

Tossups should look like this:
The narrator describes this storyâ€™s protagonist as looking â€œlike a wooden doll driven by clock-work,â€

Last edited by Schweizerkas on Sun Feb 03, 2008 7:12 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Just a reminder that the $40 discount deadline for submitting your packet is coming up in less than a week. It would be nice to get a firmer list of who's coming to this tournament as well, so that we know how many packets we should expect to be getting. Please let me know as soon as possible if you're planning on coming to this tournament (either post here or send me an email at blindqui AT stanford DOT edu). Right now, the only team I've heard is definitely coming is Chicago (how many teams are you planning on sending, Chicago?) I've heard some comments of interest from other California teams, but it would be nice to actually get an email letting me know how many teams you plan on sending (even if it's only tentative).

Oh, and if you're planning on writing a freelance packet or if you're planning on writing a packet for the MIT mirror, let me know as well.

Previous post updated to reflect current tournament field. Also, Andrew Hart is coming and is looking for teammates. If any teams that are coming need a player, please contact him (limozeen at gmail dot com).

The final deadline for submitting packets was yesterday, and I am still awaiting packets from the following teams who have not yet submitted theirs:
Illinois A
Brown
Andrew Hart/Ryan Westbrook

These teams should let me (blindqui AT stanford DOT edu) know ASAP when I can be expecting their packets.

I have also updated the above post to reflect the current field. As of now, I am expecting 15 teams to be coming. I would like the final field to be 14 or 16 teams, so we may need some of the non-packet submitting teams to either combine forces, or to split up to form another team. Please let me know if your (non-packet) team would be open to either of these options. Also, I believe Andrew Yaphe is looking for a team to play on, so if you have space for him on your team, let me or him know.

Finally, we have rooms reserved for February 2 late into the night, so if anybody would like to arrange some kind of event for after the tournament (like, e.g., ACF Pyramid), let me know.

A map of campus is here (the Old Union is at H-8):http://transportation.stanford.edu/imag ... or-bus.pdf
You can park at any of the parking meter/visitor parking locations for free on the weekend. I'd suggest trying to park in the lot just south of Tresidder Union (marked in red at I-8 on the campus map).

We will be having the team meeting at 10 AM in room 200 of the Old Union (on the second floor). We will try to get the matches started as soon after 10 as possible, so please do not be late.

We don't have enough buzzers of our own to run the tournaments, so please let me know how many buzzers your teams will be bringing.

The tournament format will likely consist of 2 brackets of 8 teams each playing an initial round robin. After that, we'll rebracket the teams into playoff brackets based on record, and teams will play the teams in their playoff bracket that they didn't already play in the initial round robin. There will be an ACF-style final if necessary. So that I can make sure the two initial brackets are roughly equal in strength, please let me know if your team roster is different from the names that are on your submitted packet.

Thirteen teams showed up to Cardinal Classic Saturday. Based on the number of teams and packets, we agreed to play a full round robin, with one packet left over for a one-game final if necessary to break a tie. At the end of the round robin, Maryland (Jonathan Magin, Charles Meigs, Chris Ray, Mike Bentley) was declared the winner with a 11-1 record. Three teams finished 10-2, ranked in order of decreasing bonus conversion: Daniel Orifice Fitting Company (Seth Teitler, Peter, Selene, Juliana), Yaphe (Andrew Yaphe, Jeff, Billy), and Brown (Jerry, Eric, Dennis, Andrew Hart).

Thanks to all the teams that showed up for the tournament, especially the teams that flied cross country to play. We were really happy to be able to put on a tournament for such an impressive field. Thanks also to Kevin Koai, Kristiaan De Greve, and Arnav Moudgil for helping me edit the tournament. and thank you to MIT for mirroring the tournament and writing packets. Finally, thanks to everybody from Stanford who helped moderate, scorekeep, and run stats.

The packet set will be posted on the Stanford Archive soon, after we've cleaned up some of the typos (assembling the set at 5 am the day of the tournament was a bad idea). If you're really impatient to look at the set, email me and I'll send you it.

Hope everyone had a good time, despite some problematic questions, and I hope we can see you all return next year for Cardinal Classic XVIII: This Tournament Goes To 11 PM.

Let's all pray to baby Jesus that Charles Meigs gets home to Maryland before next weekend's SCT. On Sunday, he was in Las Vegas waiting for his flight home. However, the flight was canceled for security reasons due to his rantings about Mukherjudaism. The next part of his epic quest includes a redeye flight to Fort Lauderdale. What crazy shenanigans will Meigs get involved with down there?